Question

Discuss on the topic virus are living or non living.​

Answer 1

Answer:

ItsSamGupta

• What does it mean to be ‘alive’? At a basic level, viruses are proteins and genetic material that survive and replicate within their environment, inside another life form. In the absence of their host, viruses are unable to replicate and many are unable to survive for long in the extracellular environment. Therefore, if they cannot survive independently, can they be defined as being ‘alive’?
• Taking opposing views, two microbiologists discuss how viruses fit with the concept of being ‘alive’ and how they should be defined.
• No, viruses are not alive
• NIGEL BROWN
• In many ways whether viruses are living or non-living entities is a moot philosophical point. There can be few organisms other than humans that have caused such devastation of human, animal and plant life. Smallpox, polio, rinderpest and foot-and-mouth viruses are all well-known for their disastrous effect on humans and animals. Less well known is the huge number of plant viruses that can cause total failure of staple crops.
• In teaching about simple viruses, I use the flippant definition of a virus as ‘gift-wrapped nucleic acid’, whether that is DNA or RNA and whether it is double- or single-stranded. The gift-wrapping is virtually always a virus-encoded protein capsid and may or may not also include a lipid coat from the host. The viral nucleic acid is replicated and the viral proteins synthesised using the host cell’s processes. In many cases the virus also encodes some of the enzymes required for its replication, a well-known example being reverse transcriptase in RNA viruses.